It's now more than a decade since Trainspotting made Danny Boyle the most exciting talent in British cinema. Even more so than his debut Shallow Grave, his adaptation of Irvine Welsh's novel was a uniquely British riposte to the postmodern zing of Quentin Tarantino's first two movies, providing the nation's youth with the key film of their era. Somehow Boyle sluiced the new confidence of Britpop and the coming political shift with haunting images of smacky delirium and urban squalor - all without sacrificing the film's intoxicating insouciance.

Since then, Boyle has genre-hopped his way through the screwball whimsy of A Life Less Ordinary, the backpacking adventure of The Beach (a less successful attempt to define the youth zeitgeist), the apocalyptic horror of 28 Days Later, and the unusual children's fantasy Millions.

Sunshine, his latest, due out on April 6, ventures into science-fiction. The breath that was once bated in anticipation of a new Danny Boyle has since largely been exhaled (blame the twin disappointments of A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach), but this new release offers an opportunity to reflect on the director's quietly amassing oeuvre and ask: is Sunshine, in 2007, what we would have hoped for from the great British hope of 1996?

This is probably his least British film so far - necessarily so, as the film is on a scale rarely achieved without significant Hollywood investment. For Sunshine is a space-travel film, floating somewhere in the constellation that includes Kubrick's 2001, Tarkovsky's Solaris, Ridley Scott's Alien and, burning rather less brightly, Paul Anderson's Event Horizon. Like these, it posits a hulk of a spacecraft deep in the firmament, where its crew is tasked with launching a nuclear reactor the size of Manhattan into the dying sun in the hope of reactivating it and thus saving the Earth from the peril of its failing warmth.

No surprise that the ship for this sun-bound mission should be called Icarus II, a reference perhaps not just to the feathered fool of Greek mythology but also to Jindrich Pólak's 1963 film Ikarie XB-1, the Czech granddaddy of space exploration cinema, whose English title Voyage to the End of the Universe neatly encapsulates the infinity-traversing appeal of this kind of adventure.

In truth, Sunshine orbits rather too closely around the formula laid down by these formidable predecessors. Approaching their final destination, the crew comes across and boards Icarus I, now an eerie ghost ship, with predictably disastrous results involving a close encounter with the kind of adversary apparently common in deepest space.

So Boyle falters on originality. But there is a sense of awe about space in Sunshine that I haven't noticed in a sci-fi film for a while. A moment near the beginning has members of the crew alerting each other to a fleeting planetary spectacle suddenly visible from their craft: Mercury is drifting past on its orbit around the sun - a sublime, rare vision that remains stuck in my mind long after the confusing action sequences have faded. This, after all, is the filmmaker who turned a junkie's desperate plunge into the grimiest toilet in Scotland into an underwater fantasia. Despite its cumbersome dramatics, Boyle's new film proves he's still got the touch. Sunshine has the uplift of one of those light-boxes prescribed to SAD sufferers - few films about impending apocalypse have felt so optimistic, nor so attuned to the beauty about to be eclipsed.